The release of the tool comes as part of a two-day visit to San Francisco, by the Home Secretary Amber Rudd, where she is meeting tech firms as well as the US Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, to discuss how the UK and US can work together to tackle terrorist content online.

AI Tool

The Home Office said it had worked with London-based ASI Data Science to develop the AI tool, which utilises “advanced machine learning to analyse the audio and visuals of a video to determine whether it could be Daesh (ISIS) propaganda.”

The government contributed £600,000 to help fund the development of the tool.

It is said to be highly accurate, and if it were to analyse one million randomly selected videos, only 50 would require additional human review.

And what is more, the tool can be used by any platform, and integrated into the upload process. The thinking is that the majority of video propaganda could be stopped before it ever reaches the internet.

The Home Office and ASI said they would share the methodology behind the new model with smaller companies, in order to help combat the abuse of their platforms by terrorists and their supporters.

But the UK government has warned that smaller platforms such as Vimeo, Telegra.ph and pCloud are increasingly targeted by Daesh and its supporters to spread their propaganda, and these smaller players often do not have the same level of resources to develop technology.

The tool was trained by using over 1,000 Daesh videos.

“Over the last year we have been engaging with internet companies to make sure that their platforms are not being abused by terrorists and their supporters,” said Home Secretary Amber Rudd. “I have been impressed with their work so far following the launch of the Global Internet Forum to Counter-Terrorism, although there is still more to do, and I hope this new technology the Home Office has helped develop can support others to go further and faster.

Rudd has this week travelled to Silicon Valley to hold a series of meetings with the main communication service providers to discuss tackling terrorist content online.